Chantal Akerman Takes Emotional Path in Film About 'Maman'

Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, the mother of the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, at home in Brussels, in a scene from the movie.CreditCreditChantal Akerman/Paradise Films-Liaison

By the age of 25, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman had made a three-hour-plus cinematic landmark with her 1975 film faithfully chronicling a housewife’s obsessive routines. But that was only the beginning. In the decades that followed, Ms. Akerman pioneered a cinema of patient observation through long takes, created essay films in ways that spawned legions of imitators, made a musical or two, undertook meditative surveys of the United State-Mexico border and the Eastern bloc, designed video installations for major galleries, and shot a film about Jewish jokes.

But her latest project — “No Home Movie,” an intimate extended visit with her mother, who died at the age of 86, in April 2014 — took her places she had not expected to go.

“I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it,” Ms. Akerman said of the emotional experience in a phone interview last week.

On Monday, “No Home Movie” will have its world premiere in the international competition of the Locarno Film Festival, in Locarno, Switzerland, and marks a brave new direction for Ms. Akerman, who is 65. She shot the film herself in the Brussels apartment of her mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, with additional images from travels in Israel. Candid and open-hearted, it mostly consists of conversations — whether in person in a neat kitchen, or over Skype from abroad — and serene observations of “Maman” puttering about. The quotidian chronicles and the wide-ranging chats together offer a snapshot of her mother’s daily life and pages from a personal history that reaches all the way back to her time in Auschwitz.

Spanning several months, “No Home Movie” is a fond portrait of the closeness between mother and daughter and of irrepressible maternal love, but also, as her mother’s health deteriorates, a reckoning with mortality. “Most of my films were touching on people but not in this direct way,” Ms. Akerman said. “They were more into implosion than explosion. I don’t think I can go back to do the type of things I did before.”

“No Home Movie” joins a filmography that has left a deep imprint on the vanguard of cinema, recognized most recently by a near-complete retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (running to Oct. 1), extensive restorations by the Royal Belgian Film Archive, and a new documentary about her, also screening at Locarno. Her critical acclaim is variously affirmed by plaudits from leading critics such as J. Hoberman, book-length academic studies, a place on the “Sight & Sound” best-films canon, and Criterion Collection DVD editions.

Ms. Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” casts a long shadow with its meticulous, distanced observation, finding beauty in banality but also expressing a fierce angst. Her pioneering nonfiction and essay work address memory and displacement with what might be called an ambiguous clarity and, always, a coolly lovely sense of composition, color and the presence of place.

The cinematic and ideological ferment of the 1970s was crucial for Ms. Akerman, who spent formative time in New York — the subject of her 1977 epistolary study “News from Home” — and absorbed work by avant-garde filmmakers. Yet the experiments in the decades to come were all her own, from the musical and rhythmic dramatic pastiches of the 1980s (“Tout Une Nuit,” “Golden Eighties”), through to her travels in post-Communist Eastern Europe (the travelogue “D’Est”), Israel (“Là-bas”), the American South (“Sud”) and elsewhere. She also directed two challenging novel adaptations: the superb, sensuous “La Captive” from Proust; and her most recent feature, “Almayer’s Folly,” a saturnine reframing of Joseph Conrad’s debut novel, shot in Cambodia.

With “No Home Movie,” the themes of displacement that thread throughout her work finally come to a head. “Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother,” Ms. Akerman said with the deep, lilting tones familiar from the voice-overs and monologues that define many of her films. “And there is ‘no home’ anymore, because she isn’t there, and when I came the last time, the home was empty.”

“No Home Movie” is an especially moving testament because of the devastating history that lay buried in her mother’s past. During World War II, after fleeing to Belgium from Poland, Nelly Akerman was sent to Auschwitz; her husband was hidden in Brussels, but other relatives died. The trauma left anxious aftershocks throughout the filmmaker’s oeuvre, often expressed obliquely. In the newest film (whose title echoes the uprooting and devastation caused by the Holocaust) Chantal Akerman tries to address the subject head-on, but her mother’s reticence is deep-seated.

“She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz,” Chantal Akerman said. “I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, ‘No, I will get crazy.’ So we could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly.”

Instead, in the film Ms. Akerman and her mother range through a variety of topics big and small: family anecdotes, stories of a secret love affair, recollections from rowdy school days, the shifting place of Judaism in their lives, and whether the dinner meat tastes good. It’s a fond back-and-forth, with Chantal Akerman taking a playful swipe now and again; her mother only ever loses her poise to gush with compliments.

“So much love is coming out of her, and I was not aware of that,” Ms. Akerman said. Referring to her mother’s unwillingness to let one long-distance chat come to a close, Ms. Akerman said, “I knew she loved me, but when I see that Skype moment, it’s really like a love affair between us.”

“No Home Movie” brings mother and daughter closer together on screen than they had ever been in past works, even though the final separation of death looms. Finding fresh technique to express the circumstances, Ms. Akerman employs handheld camerawork — instead of a tripod, she left her small camera on tables and other surfaces, like “another kind of furniture” — and even uses a Blackberry for landscape shots in Israel. The most audacious moment might be the film’s opening: a nearly four-minute take of a tree loudly buffeted by the wind, an arresting metaphor for stamina.

Whittled down from 40 hours of footage, “No Home Movie,” which runs 115 minutes, makes its debut at a festival whose ambitious selections often owe a stylistic debt to this director’s work. With her latest film, Ms. Akerman forges ahead once again. And far from creating a safe, static elegy, she has found “a passage into something else,” as she put it, in what sounds like both cinematic and emotional terms.

“I was not mourning when I was doing that,” she said of the process of editing the film and its many images of her mother. “It was the other way around: I was living, and not mourning.”